Digital devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, wireless devices and so on are available and gaining traction as essential digital devices. Other digital devices, such as personal computers, are already widely used as key digital devices for homes and businesses. At the same time, increased networking of such devices has resulted in increased connectivity of the functionality and data included in those devices. The result of the use of such networked digital devices is that users are generating unprecedented amounts of digital data from the various digital devices and computing applications, and that this unprecedented amount of data is becoming available from a variety of locations. For example, digital picture data can be captured by digital cameras and then be stored on a user's personal computer for access by a digital picture editing application. The same digital picture data may be available half way around the Earth from a computer that is networked to the user's personal computer as well. For another example, a calendar application provides a user with the ability to electronically control appointments and schedules. Other networked applications can access such calendar data as well. Thus, when digital historical data is stored in a distributed manner, but connected by way of a network, it can effectively be thought of as being in one place, whether distributed or in one place. Thus, many user interactive applications store digital histories accessible from a variety of locations. It is not obvious that all data stored that may be digital history data is recognized as such. For example, INTERNET EXPLORER® tracks a user's history of visited web sites. While this is not as straightforward of an example of a digital picture, a user's history of visited web sites is still rich with information about a user and the user's history. There are many more such application examples that electronically track user activity and generate temporally associated digital data as well.
Although users may access data and share data indirectly among various applications, the organization and harnessing of the data among the various applications would allow users to maximize the benefit from digitally recording activities. In particular, data that has an associated time reference could be cross-referenced to provide valuable information correlating a user's history or activity in time. No current technology provides storage and indexing for items making up a digitally recorded history consisting of various types of media and data. No current technology is capable of making complex associations between data, especially non-textual data such as audio and video. U.S. Appln. Ser. No. 10/075,519, filed Feb. 13, 2002, entitled “Methods and Systems for Providing a Distributed Database Store with Correlation Service” (the ′519 application) teaches a novel way to integrate historical data stored in a distributed manner. However, presently, there is no intelligent means for leveraging such a distributed database store of which the systems of the ′519 application are examples, from a computing device. Further, there is no current technology that is capable of making complex associations between data based on time, history, and items interacted with according to a common theme, such as by the same user. There is also no current technology that provides unique representation of user interface elements representing items of a digital history based on unique identification.
Thus, it would be advantageous to provide a graphical user interface (UI) that leverages the untapped power of a distributed database store. It would be further advantageous to provide a user interface that makes cross-correlations for events, places, people and things stored in a digital history. It would be desirable to display the events, places, people and things in a way that makes sense for a time period of interest specified via a timeline. It would be desirable to display the events, places, people and things in a navigation portion relating to the time period of interest in way that intuitively expresses a relative presence of the events, places, people and things in a user's life for the time period, where the navigation portion allows the user to quickly navigate to items of interest. It would be further desirable to provide intelligent defaults for displaying an object or time, and items related to the object or time that make sense for the user. It would be still further desirable to provide such a UI as a component that may be integrated into an operating system (OS), downloaded from a network location or into other applications that could make use of the UI component.